This paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond uses transaction-level data from a large discount chain together with zip-code-level explanatory variables to learn about consumer payment choices across size of transaction, location, and time.
With three years of data from thousands of stores across the country, the authors identify important economic and demographic effects; weekly, monthly, and seasonal cycles in payments, as well as time trends and significant state-level variation that is not accounted for by the explanatory variables.
The research uses the estimated model to forecast how the mix of consumer payments will evolve and to forecast future demand for currency.
The estimates based on this large retailer, together with forecasts for the explanatory variables, lead to a benchmark prediction that the cash share of retail sales will decline by 2.54 percentage points per year over the next several years.
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